Thursday, May 17, 2012

Lingering Items--Wishful Thinking Edition

Glancing at the baseball standings in
early May is usually a fool’s game. The reason the baseball season
is so long is that it takes a hundred or so games to actually get the
full measure of a team’s worth. Anything short of that can and
often does lead to false impressions. That isn’t just a cautious
reminder about your team. It’s applicable to all teams.

Still, avoiding my own advice, it’s
worth looking at the standings in the American League Central right
now where the Indians find themselves in first place by 3 games over
the Detroit Tigers. That’s the kind of lead that can be lost in
the weekend and as we saw last season, a hot start does not
necessarily beget a hot finish.

Putting the Indians aside for the
moment, though, aren’t you at least tempted to draw some
conclusions about the division generally? For instance, the
Minnesota Twins are already 15 games below .500. Even at an early
stage of the season that’s too huge of a hole to climb out of in
terms of being a pennant contender. They’re done.

The Kansas City Royals are done, too.
It doesn’t matter that they’re only 5 games under .500 at the
moment. It might as well be their usual 50. The Royals were done
when the season started for exactly the same reason they, like the
Pittsburgh Pirates, are done as each season starts. They suck.

The franchise is poorly run because it
is headed up by a management that secretly doesn’t believe they can
ever be successful and then goes about its business proving just
that. In Kansas City, they labor under the perpetual dread of their
circumstances, like Eeyore, knowing that no matter what they do, who
they sign, how they train, it’s never going to be good enough
because all the best looking girls are still going to go out with the
guys from Camp Mohawk. So they show up, make a little noise once in
awhile but mostly try not to get in anyone’s way.

That leaves the race to three teams:
the Indians, the White Sox and the Tigers. This is where it does get
interesting because at the moment the teams are in a statistical dead
heat despite the differences in their records. More time, much more,
will be needed to sort it out.

The Tigers looked like a team that
could challenge the Texas Rangers for the number of runs scored this
year. Yet they have scored exactly the same number of runs as the
Indians at the moment, which is actually quite stunning. The White
Sox are lagging behind, but only by a few runs.

The Tigers are hitting better than the
Indians, the White Sox a little worse and none are hitting
particularly well. The difference is that the Indians have a higher
on base percentage then the other two, but again the differences
aren’t particularly statistically significant.

Pitching is somewhat a similar story.
White Sox starters have a distinct advantage over those in Cleveland
and Detroit, with a collective ERA that’s a half run better. But
whatever advantage that gives is lost in the bullpen where the
Indians clearly have the advantage at the moment.

White Sox relievers, at 38%, are second
only to Baltimore in the percentage of inherited runners who end up
scoring. Detroit is close behind at 34%. Indians relievers are
third best at only 22%. Even more telling is that while the Indians
bullpen has been called upon the most to enter games in save
situations, they’re also converting 78% of those changes, which is
fourth in the majors. Tigers relievers have been called upon 36
times in save situations and are only converting 57% of those
chances. The White Sox relievers are getting even less chances and
still only converting 57% of those chances.

What this all suggests is that like a
horse race that’s at the quarter pole, the main horses are still
too bunched to figure out who will win. The AL Central will be a
3-team race and could easily stay that way for the entire season.
The Indians’ flaws are more known to the locals but in truth
neither Detroit nor Chicago seem to be clearly superior at the
moment.

It may be that Detroit eventually finds
its footing offensively, but their bullpen will remain suspect for
the season unless they find some new arms. It’s going to take a
lot of runs to cover up for a bullpen that can only be counted on
about half the time to hold a lead and get a save. Chicago would
seem to need both more hitting and better pitching to stay
competitive.

The Indians aren’t close to being the
best team in the American League this year. In truth, they don’t
compare all that well with the best teams in the West and the East.
But the Central is proving to be weak and that, frankly, is Shapiro’s
dream scenario. The Indians are never going to be able to go toe to
toe with the bullies, but since they currently reside in a division
of dipshits at the moment they have a fighting chance. Will the fans
notice?

**

Have you purchased your Brandon Weeden
Fat Head wall hanging yet? Maybe they’re on back order given all
of the run Weeden’s been getting from the Plain Dealer lately.

Most certainly Weeden looked good to
novice NFL beat writer Dennis Manloff at a rookie mini-camp. Weeden
was wearing shorts and a helmet so that in part could be the reason
for the gushing analysis of Weeden’s rocket arm and pin point
precision. It was enough really to send Manloff into a rant about
how Weeden shouldn’t have Colt McCoy looking over his shoulder when
the season gets underway.

I’d talk about how little Manloff
seems to understand professional sports and athletes but the call for
dumping McCoy in order to clearly signal to Weeden that he’s our
new man crush in order to soothe his psyche was more than enough
proof. If Weeden’s is so tender as to be intimidated by the
understudy just aching for the star to get sick, then Weeden has
absolutely no chance to be a starter in the Arena League, let alone
the NFL.

What’s surprising though is the
complete lack of historical context Manloff and others have while
anointing Weeden and clearing his path. Weeden plays for an
organization that hasn’t had the same person starter at quarterback
for 3 straight seasons since Bernie Kosar. They’ve made so many
draft blunders over so many years that it’s insane at the moment to
give the latest occupiers of the Berea headquarters the benefit of
the doubt on any of their picks.

I’m not particularly laying the wood
to Tom Heckert or Mike Holmgren, either. It’s just that whatever
you might think of the players they’ve drafted thus far, if you’re
measuring results by such pedestrian measures as wins, then they
aren’t any better than the previous clowns or the clowns before
them or the clowns before them. Remember, too, that Holmgrem is the
same guy that deliberately threw away a season by retaining a head
coach he didn’t respect just because he didn’t want to hurt the
guy’s feelings. In short, until all these fine draft picks of
previous years start actually producing more than 4 or 5 wins a
season, there’s no reason to afford them any more benefit of the
doubt then their predecessors.

That’s the context that Manloff needs
to consider before he starts throwing all in on Weeden without the
benefit of having seen him actually perform in one practice with the
entire team. Weeden may very well be a franchise savior, but let’s
wait a little longer for that judgment. In the mean time, let’s
keep around last year’s starter as a hedge, even if he’s not your
idea of the Answer. He didn’t he embarrass the team given the
embarrassing group of players that aforementioned Heckert and
Holmgren surrounded him with. Something tells me that this team just
might need him.

**

As if Dan Gilbert didn’t have enough
on his plate with his sparkling new casino, he now is a member of the
NBA’s newly constituted competition committee. It’s an
interesting development, to say the least, one he wanted and one he
may come to regret.

The NFL has a competition committee,
but it’s populated with head coaches and they debate the meaty
issues of the day, such as the tuck rule and whether or not the bump
and run should be further limited.

Until now, the NBA’s competition
committee was an unsightly gangly mess of a group of all the league’s
general managers. Getting them to agree on a lunch menu probably ate
up most of the average meeting. Slimming down the committee and
putting one of the more vocal owners in the league on it will
certainly shake things up. Whether or not it’s for the greater
good is a whole other matter.

The NBA does have a huge competition
problem. Despite the rancorous labor negotiations that gave the
owners a little more financial certainty and relief, the new
collective bargaining problem didn’t solve one of Gilbert’s main
issues: the fact that the rules are stacked against teams trying to
rebuild themselves back into relevance.

Here’s Gilbert’s main concern. His
team has Kyrie Irving, the recently named rookie of the year. Yet
Gilbert knows that in a league with the fewest number of players per
team, it remains the hardest league in which to turn around a team’s
fortunes. Gilbert has already let the fans know that even next
year’s team may not be playoff bound. Indeed, with luck it won’t
be because in the NBA it’s far better for your team’s long-term
prospects to not make the playoffs then to just make them.

One of the main reasons that it takes
so long to graduate to the upper tier of the league is that you’re
punished with purgatory for just making the playoffs. You’re out
of the draft lottery and out of the running for the few really good
college players that can make an immediate difference to a NBA team.

Most of the things that will keep
Gilbert’s Cavs on the outer fringes of basketball relevancy can’t
be changed simply because of a competition committee. He can’t,
for instance, suddenly make Cleveland a warm weather city where
available free agents want to winter, irrespective of how well his
casino is climate controlled. He can’t change the bizarre,
exception-riddled salary cap that keeps the really good potential
free agents mostly tethered to their current teams. The time and
place for that was at the bargaining table and it didn’t happen.
In short, absent the overhaul that can only come through difficult
labor negotiations, there isn’t much that can actually be done to
shorten the Cavs 10-year path back toward relevance, Irving
notwithstanding.

I have great admiration for Gilbert.
He’s a guy that can get things done. But for as hard as he works
and for as hard has he pushes, I think he’s starting to realize
that the odds aren’t just long, but almost impossible for achieving
meaningful change. And when he becomes frustrated with the process,
which he will, just hope that the only thing that happens is that he
quits the committee or rotates off. Neither the Cavs, its fans nor
the city can afford to let Gilbert get fed up with a broken system
and take his considerable talents elsewhere, unless it’s across the
street to Progressive Field or down the road to Cleveland Browns
Stadium. In that case, I hope his work on the competition committee
breaks his resolve.

**

Apropos to nothing, but this week’s
question to ponder: When did the NHL playoffs become more compelling
viewing than the NBA playoffs?

It's hard to be a hockey fan in this town. We have no team, the Blue Jackets suck and the Penguins are, well, from Pittsburgh. For a long time, the NHL was an awful product and by the time it went on strike, it was the least popular professional sport by a wide margin. Absolutely no one cared it they ever resolved their dispute. But over the last few years, through simple marketing and increased television exposure, the product has gotten significantly better. The playoffs this year have been particularly compelling, with the Devils and Rangers semi final shaping up to be an all time classic series.